In this post I’m going to point out some of the dangers involved in believing everything you read on Internet marketing forums. As you get more involved in Internet marketing you will get a lot of well-known gurus telling you that you should visit Internet marketing forums to find information, advice, guides, and also product reviews.

While it is true that you can get some very good information and advice on Internet marketing forums you must also bear in mind that many of the people posting information on these forums are marketers themselves and could well be there just to make a fast buck. One of the ways you can check the credibility of the marketers posting is to check the number of posts they have made and also gives the forum allows thanks to be given then you should check this to.

There is a downside to this method is that so many of these forums there are cliques of marketers that sometimes can band together to give each other credibility. Obviously this can be quite difficult to detect especially for newbies. This is especially important in your looking at a product review or a product that is for sale.

I came across a classic example of this only this month. I’m not going to name the product or the forum as I’m not in the habit of trashing other people, marketers, or forums for that matter. Personally I think that negativity does exactly what it says on the tin that is its negative obviously to the person you may be trashing but also to yourself.

What I will say is that the service in question was to do with writing. Basically it advertised itself much like an eat as much as you can buffet in other words you pay the monthly fee and you would get as many rewrites as you wanted. I actually thought this seemed a bit too good to be true but thought what the heck this guy has a good rep so I’ll give it a go.

In the thread announcing this service there were about 10 good reviews of the product and service. It seems to me like a good deal and was going to use it to get some click bank sales letters rewritten. As soon as I joined up I submitted five and was notified the next day the two of them had already started and giving me an estimated completion date of about 3 to 5 days later.

It seemed to me like this was off to a good start and was only slightly concerned when the following day the third rewrite was given an estimated date of 6 to 9 days. The warning bells should have gone off about two days later when the estimated time for the remaining two was given as two weeks in three weeks respectively. The last one actually had in a completion date of the day before my next month subscription was due.

As you can see it’s pretty apparent that this was a way of making sure it was not unlimited. Later to make matters worse the fourth rewrite was over two weeks late, I wrote to the provider questioning this. His reply was what you expect this is high quality work etc. etc. night in question the rewrites for good but it was advertised as unlimited. I wrote back and point this out to them and he said well you can always cancel. Great attitude or what? I replied that at the end of the month I would cancel once had received my five rewrites.

His response was to cancel my membership still with two articles outstanding and refused when asked for a refund. So not only had they not provided the unlimited service that they had not even completed the five articles I’ve requested. The interesting thing is I think with hindsight I’m not the only one. The thread in the Internet marketing forum concerning this service has been closed by him. Basically after the initial good reports the next four or five were all bad and have had experiences similar to my own. Closing the thread meant that I could not post my experiences and to be honest it isn’t worth the hassle of starting a new one.

Upon closer examination of the members who had given good reviews it was obvious that they took it in turns to recommend each other’s products. So take this as a warning always be very careful when buying products through a forum just on a few good reviews alone. Always make sure that you check the posts made by the people recommending the product, it could save you a lot of hassle in the future.

You might say I really should have known better but to be honest I assumed that someone with this reputation would not refuse a refund when they did not provide the service requested. I have initiated a refund request with PayPal but they are not always the best at helping out in these situations. Another good piece of advice when buying anything on the Internet is to always make sure you use a credit card and not a debit card at this makes it a lot easier to request a chargeback.

I know this may sound a bit negative but it is all about being careful about not saying for one minute that you should not visit forums as they can be a very good source of information. But bear in mind you should always do a little bit of due diligence before committing to either buying a product or acting on advice.

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